Increasing Monuments Visibility in Kwara: A Perspective of the Kwara State University Wikimedia Fan Club

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The Kwara State University Wikimedia Fan Club with support from the Wikimedia Nigerian User Group.  Micro-Grant got an opportunity to participate in this year’s WikiLovesMonuments 2022 Campaign. The Wiki Loves Monuments campaign is an international photographic competition to promote historic sites around the World through Wikimedia projects (mainly Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons).

Our Goals

  1. Create awareness about Wiki Loves Monuments and its activities at Kwara State University Malete.
  2. Recruit and train 10 new editors through various photo expeditions, upload sessions, and edit-a-thons.
  3. Engage 25 existing editors to contribute to Commons and other sister projects.
  4. Add 100+ images about some selected tourist attractions in Kwara state such as Dada Pottery, Sango Crushed Rock, and Sobi Hills; and improve articles by integrating these images in their related articles or creating articles/article subsections for non-existing articles.

What We Did

On the 16th of September 2022, members of the Kwara State University Fan Club visited tourist sites of attraction in Kwara State to take images of educationally useful objects as part of the global Wiki Loves Monuments 2022. Some of the important places visited include:

  1. The Sobi Hill from which the highest natural landscape of the entire city of Ilorin and its environs can be seen. 
  2. Crushed Rock Sango: a man-made tourist attraction a few meters away from Sobi hill.
  3. Dada pottery Ilorin, the largest concentration of potters in Kwara State. 
  4. Held a series of online training to guide participants on how to contribute to WikiCommons, better understand the different types of creative commons licensing, and upload quality media files.

How We Achieved It

Participation in the training increased as a result of publicity and awareness made in various faculties within the academic community. In addition, we sent weekly updates about the campaign on the fan club WhatsApp group. Furthermore, we followed up with each participant to ensure they had created their accounts, and user pages, and join the event dashboard before the physical training session. 

Our Outcomes

  • 3 events: We did a photo walk to 3 tourist sites, online training for participants to learn how to contribute to the project, and physical training to round up the campaign at the Muhammadu Buhari Library, Kwara State University Malete.
  • 39 participants: we had more participants due to the publicity at various departments and on social media
  • 353 images uploaded on commons: This was a result of increased participation by members of the fan club. For more information on the metrics, see the project dashboard.

Challenge

It was difficult locating the Crushed Rock in Sango as there was very little information about the rock online. Moreso, the location was not covered on google Maps or open street maps.

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